I’m very pleased to announce that version 0.11.0 of the orcus library is officially out in the wild! You can download the latest source package from the project’s home page.

Lots of changes went into this release, but the two that I would highlight most are the inclusions of JSON and YAML parsers and their associated tools and interfaces. This release adds two new command-line tools: orcus-json and orcus-yaml. The orcus-json tool optionally handles JSON references to external files when the --resolves-refs option is given, though currently it only supports resolving external files that are on the local file system and only when the paths are relative to the referencing file.

I’ve also written an API documentation on the JSON interface in case someone wants to give it a try. Though the documentation on orcus is always work-in-progress, I’d like to spend more time to make the documentation in a more complete state.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of mdds 1.1.0. As always, the source package can be downloaded from the project’s home page.

This release includes the addition of 2 new data structures – trie_map and packed_trie_map, significant performance improvement on sorted_string_map, general bug fixes on some of the existing data structures, enhancement on multi_type_matrix, and support for user-defined event handlers for multi_type_vector.

Huge thanks to Markus Mohrhard for sorted_string_map’s performance improvement as well as the bug fixes and the enhancement on multi_type_matrix’s walk() method.

In addition, thanks to David Tardon, we now use automake as our build system which will simplify the process of package generation and integrity check among other things.

Here is the full list of changes since version 1.0.0:

all

switched our build system to using automake.

packed_trie_map (new)

new data structure that implements a trie also known as a prefix tree. This implementation requires all key values be known at construction time, after which its content is considered immutable. Internally it packs all its nodes in a single contiguous array for space and lookup efficiencies.

trie_map (new)

new data structure that implements a trie. It works similar to packed_trie_map except that this version is mutable.

multi_type_matrix

added a variant of walk() that takes the upper-left and lower-right corners to allow walking through a subset of the original matrix.

multi_type_vector

fixed incorrect return values of the increment and decrement operators of in-block iterators. They would previously return a value_type pointer which did not conform to the behaviors of STL iterators.

added support for custom event handlers for element block acquisitions and releases.

flat_segment_tree

fixed incorrect return values of the increment and decrement operators of its leaf-node iterators as in multi_type_vector’s fix.

sorted_string_map

significantly improved the performance of its find() method by switching from using linear search to using binary search. The improvement is especially visible with a large number of elements.

Documentation

I’ve also added Doxygen documentation for this library for those who are more used to the Doxygen style comprehensive code documentation. The official API documentation has also received some love in the code examples for multi_type_vector. I plan on adding more code examples to the documentation as time permits.

Keynote

First off, let me just say that it was such an honor and pleasure to have had the opportunity to present a keynote at the LibreOffice mini-Conference in Osaka. It was a bit surreal to be given such an opportunity almost one year after my involvement with LibreOffice as a paid full-time engineer ended, but I’m grateful that I can still give some tales that some people find interesting. I must admit that I haven’t been that active since I left Collabora in terms of the number of git commits to the LibreOffice core repository, but that doesn’t mean that my passion for that project has faded. In reality it is far from it.

There were a lot of topics I could potentially have covered for my keynote, but I chose to talk about the 5-year history of the project, simply because I felt that we all deserved to give ourselves a lot of praises for numerous great things we’ve achieved in this five years time, which not many of us do simply because we are all very humble beings and always too eager to keep moving forward. I felt that, sometimes, we do need to stop for a moment, look back and reflect on what we’ve done, and enjoy the fruits of our labors.

Osaka

Though I had visited Kyoto once before, this was actually my first time in Osaka. Access from the Kansai International Airport (KIX) into the city was pretty straightforward. The venue was located on the 23th floor of Grand Front Osaka North Building Tower B (right outside the north entrance of JR Osaka Station), on the premises of GMO DigiRock who kindly sponsored the space for the event.Osaka Station north entrance.

Conference

The conference took place on Saturday January 9th of 2016. The conference program consisted of my keynote, followed by four regular-length talks (30 minutes each), five lightning talks (5 minutes each), and round-table discussions at the end. Topics of the talks included: potential use of LibreOffice in high school IT textbooks, real-world experiences of large-scale migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, LibreOffice API how-tos, and to LibreOffice with NVDA the open source screen reader.

After the round-table discussions, we had some social event with beer and pizza before we concluded the event. Overall, 48 participants showed up for the conference.Conference venue.

Hackfest

We also organized a hackfest on the following day at JUSO Coworking. A total of 20 plus people showed up for the hackfest, to work on things like translating the UI strings to Japanese, authoring event-related articles, and of course hacking on LibreOffice. I myself worked on implementing simple event callbacks in the mdds library, which, by the way, was just completed and merged to the master branch today.

Many folks hard at work during hackfest.

Conclusion

It was great to see so many faces, new and old, many of whom traveled long distance to attend the conference. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel all the way from North Carolina across the Pacific, and it was well worth the hassle of a jet lag.

A new version of mdds is out, and this time, we’ve decided to bump up the version to 1.0.0. As always, you can download it from the project’s main page.

Here is the highlight of this release.

First off, C++11 is now a hard requirement starting with this release. It’s been four years since the C++11 standard was finalized. It’s about time we made this a new baseline.

Secondly, we now have an official API documentation. It’s programatically generated from the source code documentation via Doxygen, Sphinx and Breathe. Huge thanks to the contributors of the aforementioned projects. You guys make publishing API documentation such a breathe (no pun intended).

This release has finally dropped mixed_type_matrix which has been deprecated for quite some time now in favor of multi_type_matrix.

The multi_type_vector data structure has received some performance optimization thanks to patches from William Bonnet.

Aside from that, there is one important bug fix in sorted_string_map, to fix false positives due to incorrect key matching.

API versioning

One thing I need to note with this release is the introduction of API versioning. Starting with this release, we’ll use API versions to flag any API-incompatible releases. Going forward, anytime we introduce an API-incompatible change, we’ll use the version of that release as the new API version. The API version will only contain major and minor components i.e. API versions can be 1.0, 1.2, 2.1 etc. but never 1.0.6, for instance. That also implies that we will never introduce API-incompatible changes in the micro releases.

The API version will be a part of the package name. For example, this release will have a package name of mdds-1.0 so that, when using tools like pkg-config to query for compiler/linker flags, you’ll need to query for mdds-1.0 instead of simply mdds. The package name will stay that way until we have another release with an API-incompatible change.

The implementation of this method has been contributed by Markus Mohrhard.

flat_segment_tree

Another major change in this release is with flat_segment_tree. Previously, flat_segment_tree had an unintentional constraint that the value_type must be of numeric type. In this release, that constraint has been officially lifted so that the user of this data structure can now store values of arbitrary types with this data structure. The credit goes to David Tardon for adding this nice improvement.

Other than that, there are no other changes from 0.12.0.

mdds on GitLab

Incidentally, the mdds project now has a new home at gitlab.com. The new URL for the project page is now

First, the version 0.9.1 of the Ixion library is now available. You can download the 0.9.1 source package from the project’s main page.

This is purely a maintenance release to address portability problems in the python bindings as well as other minor build and packaging issues. Many thanks to David Tardon for single-handedly addressing these issues.

After more than a year since the release of 0.7.0, I’m once again very happy to announce that the version 0.7.1 of the Orcus library is now available for download. You can download the package from the project’s download page.

This is a maintenance release. It primarily includes bug fixes and build fixes since the 0.7.0 release with no new features. That said, the most notable aspect of this release is that it is buildable with the version 0.9.0 of the Ixion library which was just released a week ago. So, if you are trying to package and distribute the newly-released Ixion library but are unable to do so because of Orcus not being buildable with it, you might be interested in this release.

The next major upgrade will be 0.9.0 whose development is on-going on the current master branch. Hopefully that release won’t be too far away.

After a somewhat long hiatus, I’m very happy to announce that the version 0.9.0 of the Ixion library has just been released. You can download the source package from the project’s download page.

The highlight of this release is the new Python binding. Though still somewhat experimental, Ixion’s Python API is considered equally important to the C++ counterpart, and it is my intention to make both Python and C++ API my priority from this point on.

I have made the documentation for the Python API available here. This documentation is still rough around the edges, but hopefully it will improve over time.

The highlight of this release is mostly with the segment_tree data structure, where its value type previously only supported pointer types. Markus Mohrhard worked on removing that constraint from segment_tree so that you can now store values of arbitrary types just like you would expect from a template container.

Aside from that, there are some minor bug and build fixes. Users of the previous versions are encouraged to update to this version.